Telephone call centers are now widely used to provide services in both the commercial and governmental sectors. A commercial enterprise may use a call center to take orders, arrange appointments, provide warranty registration or helpdesk advice, and the like. A governmental office may use a call center to coordinate requests from citizens for emergency services such as fire fighting or police intervention. Such commercial enterprises and governmental offices may own and manage their own proprietary call centers, or they may contract the services of vendors who specialize in call centers.
Timeliness in answering incoming calls often has acute importance, as is self evident in the case of emergency calls to police departments. Further, the terms of contracts between commercial enterprises and call center vendors often specify average or maximum times that incoming calls may not exceed while lingering in a call center queue before being answered by an agent.
Timeliness specifications may be transgressed when an agent leaves his or her call center station without giving proper notice, which notice requires overt action by the agent to inform the call center routing algorithm that the agent will be unavailable. Calls continue to be routed to that agent despite his or her absence. In manual-answer call centers, these calls go unanswered, of course, and increase the average-time-to-answer for the call center. In principle, such unanswered call may also violate maximum-time-to-answer specifications. In practice, they always annoy customers and clients; in the extreme, they may have dire consequences when emergencies are involved. To minimize the increase in average-time-to-answer in manual-answer call centers, and to satisfy maximum-time-to-answer specifications, calls that are not answered after a predetermined number of rings are returned to queue, to be assigned to another agent.
In contrast to a manual-answer call center, an automatic-answer call center does not ring calls to agents. Instead, an automatic-answer call center, which is sometimes called a forced-answer call center, selects an agent on record as being available, assigns a call from the queue to the agent, and automatically answers the call for the agent (i.e., establishes a connection between the agent and the calling party automatically). Relative to manual call answering, automatic call answering provides a better average-time-to-answer for call centers, and provides more responsive service to callers.
When an agent leaves his or her station in an automatic-answer call center without giving proper notice, however, an incoming call may still be routed to the agent and answered automatically, even though the agent is not actually present to serve the calling party. When this happens, an unchecked open connection is established. The open connection has all the adverse consequences of an open connection in a manual-answer call center. Unlike a manual-answer call center, however, an automatic-answer call center has no way of minimizing the damage caused by such an open connection by returning the call to queue.
Thus there is a need to provide a method for processing calls in call centers with automatic answering that preserves the responsiveness of automatic call answering, but which also provides the return-to-queue safeguards of manual call answering.